What Makes an Immune System Ignore an Infection?

This week's episode explores why some immune systems ignore infections. We look into how different factors can disrupt the balance between two key parts of the immune system, TH1 and TH2 cells. TH1 cells act quickly to kill infections, while TH2 cells coordinate longer-term responses and produce antibodies. When the balance tips too much towards TH2, it can lead to chronic inflammation and less effective infection control. Factors like acute illnesses, stress, and antibiotics can trigger these imbalances. Understanding these triggers helps to explain why some people get sick more easily or have different reactions to the same infections.

In this episode you will learn about:

• Immune system balance and triggers for chronic infections
• How stress, antibiotics, and immune system interactions can lead to chronic illness
• Immune system changes during pregnancy and postpartum, with potential for infections to surface
• Vaccine and mold triggers for immune system imbalance
• Immune system triggers and recovery

Instagram: @heyheyelizabethmae
Website: www.heyheymae.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, you're gonna be okay. I'm your host, Elizabeth May, and my functional health practice helps people heal when they've exhausted traditional options. When no one can figure your health challenges out, my team helps you resolve symptoms and restores your health. You're listening to my podcast, where we'll hear stories of healing chronic illness from a root cause approach. This week we are going to dive into what makes an immune system ignore an infection. Last week we talked a little bit about immune system balance and how that happens and what the body is doing in the immune system. I think after our experience with the pandemic, the immune system became something of interest to us, something that we were curious about. And we also saw that people suffered from things like long COVID, where others experienced it shortly, or still others had really poor, poor outcomes, including death and severe sickness and all sorts of needs. And so we've become more curious about the immune system. And I kind of want to raise the idea of what are things that can trigger these chronic infections to surface, or what are things that can trigger an immune system to kind of say stuck? We talked about that immune balance, and that really is a key part of it. So a lot of times I have clients ask, you know, why do I have these issues and I eat so, so well? And my husband eats Taco Bell all the time and he doesn't struggle with anything, but I'm over here with this stuff. We have different immune systems going on, right? We have different infections, we have different body states, and triggering events really are the key. There are immune triggers that can create an imbalance in the body. And that's kind of what we want to go back to. So let's start with a shorty little review on what immune balance looks like. We have that main um two sections of TH1 killer that's gonna go kill something. Strep throat comes in your body and it's gonna go kill it, clean it up, and you're not gonna get strep throat. Same thing with being exposed to somebody. Maybe you're around somebody with COVID and you did not get it. Well, chances are it made it to your body, but your killer TH1 side of your immune system actually kept your body from becoming sick. Then there's the TH2 side, which is our antibody side. So TH2 cells are attacking pathogens in a different way. They're more of a delayed response. I like to think of them as like the ladies of the immune system. They're directing, they're producing a lot of communication. There's a lot of messages over time that tell other immune cells how to do their job, tell other immune cells to go and make antibodies. And then the antibodies will head out and attack everything from bacteria, viruses, sometimes allergens, um, earnest allergens, good ones, right? You're exposed to like a whole lot of pollen in the air because it's springtime and your body is going to remember that. So now antibodies, hey, go go eat up this pollen, don't let it come into Elizabeth's system. We just want to get it gone. So we don't have to have allergy type of inflammation cascade response. That's good. But sometimes that TH2 side gets mistaken and it starts to attack our food. Um, TH2 is truly like a collaborative effort. Whatever these cells say, antibodies then listen and proliferate. They build a more robust army against whatever it is that the immune system is trying to target. So TH2 is a slower, a lot of antibody communication. But again, TH2 is a lot more communication, a lot more antibodies. And we we want to think about TH2 creating IgEG and IgM antibodies. IgM come about when you're sick more acutely and last for a couple of months and then they uh disappear. We think of them as IgM marines, we're calling in the marines for an acute sickness situation. And then you have IgG antibodies, which is that bigger, those are your ground troops. They're going to continue to multiply, multiply, multiply to deal with an ongoing infection. So IgGs are often what we see really elevated with that antibody TH2 side of the immune system being really present. And ultimately, when TH2 is up, we have less intellular immune cleanup going on. We've got more pathogens able to hide in cells, we have a lot more inflammation, we have a lot more allergic kind of response. So, what we want, just like in your household, is fair play between both sides of TH1 and TH2. They should both be doing group work to mitigate threats to your body. They should be cleaning up new pathogens that come in, they should be tidying up any old sickness. Say you had strep throat last week. They should, that killer side should still be going through and purging, cleaning up, getting rid of. And then that TH2 side should be handling inflammation and responding to things that need to respond. And TH2 actually mediates parasite stuff. So we get into this lots more as we go along. But the current parasite stuff can be another hint for us that there's imbalance in the immune system because we're not getting like a long-standing kind of clearance. But we're here to talk about triggering events for the immune system. Why is it that some immune systems ignore an infection? My kids get strep throat, I get it, my husband doesn't. Our kid has a Bartonella infection, I get it. My husband didn't get it. Um, whatever the case may be, or one kid has major health issues and the other kids have no big deal. Um, maybe one child has so much eczema and the other kids don't have any issue. My favorite even is like maybe we all live in mold, but only a couple of us are struggling. We will get into this. So we're gonna kind of talk through some of these immune triggers that can push the body into TH2 dominance where we have more inflammation, we have more of that heavy ground truth building and less of that marine killer response going on. So we're gonna kind of talk through that. What are triggering events? And the first one I like to talk about is just an acute infection that's kind of simple, right? You know, when you get sick, a sickness is gonna interact with the immune system in one way or another. Whether I think COVID's a great example, honestly, because families got that a lot at the same time because we're together, but everyone's individual bodies are different. You may get it sooner, you may get it later, but the the act of infection is gonna um interact with both TH1 and TH2. And sometimes one side will stay stuck and participating for a long time, think kind of long COVID, where TH2 maybe gets stuck in overdrive for inflammation. Um, but after that acute infection, maybe the immune system doesn't go back to where it should. Less intense infection like streptococcus can cause us, say you have a strep infection and your health just like continues to snowball after that. Something more intense like aggressive mono or EBV can do the same thing where we have an imbalance after we've had the illness. So I get asked a lot, what does it mean if I'm not recovering or getting back to life as normal after I've had mono? Or the big one is what happens if my teen's taking forever to get better after mono? Well, we have imbalance, right? We don't have an adequate killer side that's going out and killing those EBV cells. It's a very slow crawl to immune support. And a lot of times we're seeing an uptick in that TH1 side where we have more inflammation, the child feels really groggy, they're really exhausted, maybe food's bothering them, maybe they're having um just more like puffiness and food sensitivity stuff where that TH2 side is more dominant after the acute illness. So an acute sickness can be an immune trigger. Now, the important thing to remember too is what is the immune trigger doing? If an immune system isn't able to turn back to appropriate TH1 and TH2 balance. Remember, TH1, TH2, they're like a teeter-totter. They're like fair play in your house. Both members of your household should be doing dishes and laundry and greeting people at the front door and taking care of kids. And when one side is doing more than the other, things get out of whack, right? Same with the immune system. We want them balanced, but when it gets imbalanced, it can get stuck on this TH2. More allergies, more food sensitivities, FPIs, more autoimmunity, just autoimmune cascades are perfect for this. If you started with one autoimmune disease and it turned into a whole bunch of others, we have a system that has an overreactive TH2 side. And when that teeter-totter gets tipped to a lot of TH2, that killer side is low. And so things, infections that may have been dormant for you for years, you haven't had EBV since you were 20. And now you just had a baby and we're seeing the EBV come back again. It's because that immune system is imbalanced and the TH1 killer side isn't killing like it should be. And so those infections come out of dormancy in that time. So an acute infection is our first example of that. Stressor, this is another one that's great. I love to use the example of shingles because this is something that we see a lot of people had chicken pox as a kid. So that was the initial infection. The body put it into dormancy. The body has remained nice, good, steady immune balance for many years, right? If the body has kept the chicken pox chill, the older person loses their spouse, they lose a child, they have a major stressor in their life, a divorce. And what comes? Here it is. Well, guess what that is? That's the herpes zosser virus that started the chicken pox infection many years ago in childhood, and it's just now resurfacing in adulthood because of a stressor. So a stressor can be an immune trigger. My other favorite group of clients to support, honestly, because it's such a fragile, compounding time, and it's part of my own story, is how post-divorce or traumatic um situation like that can create so much ongoing stress on the body that that stressor creates immune imbalance. Um, death can do the same thing whether you lose someone close to you or someone further away. We've seen children before not be old enough to really process a death and to be able to understand that. But emotionally, the loss their body was experiencing was a major stressor to them. And then they're struggling with sickness and immune imbalance, immune dysfunction. Moving can be a stressor, whether you're doing all the moving, whether it's downsizing, whether it's kid moving and they just don't have language or they can't function in that very well. All those things are big stressors. Job loss is another one. We've seen clients who develop chronic infections after each one of these stressors. But I truly think the shingles thing is really the best example because we all know somebody older who lost somebody and then had shingles for a couple of weeks and they're trying to get through a funeral with all the pain of the infection. And it's just like, wow, why does that happen to Betty? She had all that stuff at one time. Well, she had a stressor on her immune system and it no longer could keep those dormant infections dormant, so they came roaring through. Something else that can cause immune dysfunction would be antibiotics. So we talk about antibiotics a lot in the holistic world because they're bad. Well, I'm here to tell you they are wonderful. And if I need an antibiotic, I would please like for you to save my life with it. But antibiotics do kill. What do they kill? Bacteria. They kill bad bacteria, but sometimes the good bacteria get lost along the way, right? They're not always discerning between good, helpful bacteria in your microbiome and bad mic, bad bacteria in your microbiome. So sometimes secondary symptoms of antibiotics can be things like diarrhea, allergic reactions, breathing difficulties, skin reactions. Um, and part of that can be like a die-off effect. And then part of it can just be that we're we're lessening our good bacteria, right? It doesn't pick good or bad. So good bacteria can be lessened. What do good bacteria do? They're part of the immune system, they're there to help your body create a good and healthy immune response. So ultimately, our bodies are more bacteria than human cells. Those are fun facts to trick your kids with, not really trick to dazzle them with, because it's true. And after antibiotics, this balance can be greatly affected, especially with several rounds of antibiotics or with Ivy versions of heftier antibiotics. I have a kid client. She, as a child, had to have a round of Cipro after an infection just like took over like wildfire. And the Cipro seemed to trigger a lot of leg pain in her. It seemed to trigger a lot of eczema in her. She had all sorts of new issues that she never had before the cipro round. And her GI health was so hard to get back on track. And she actually met her when she was a teen, and this happened when she was seven or eight, and she persisted with that batch of symptoms. And by the time we got to the end of it and she came here, we saw that there was Streptococcus overgrowth. There was actually Lyme overgrowth. She had grown up going to the upper northeast to Lyme endemic areas, probably had been bitten when she was younger, but she'd been bitten many times. But it wasn't until that antibiotic round of the Ivy Cipro, not that that's a bad medication, but it's hefty, right? So it did modulate her immune system. It interacted with it in a way that it did not get back to a balanced place after Instreptococcus took hold and Lyme took cold. And those persisted to be issues until we addressed them in her early teen years when we worked together. So antibiotic rounds can change things. I'll have older adults come and they'll say, I used to be able to eat anything. I used to not have any health issues. And then I got this like stomach bug. Think of one male client in particular, and everything's been off since then. And I've had diarrhea for like 10 years now, and nothing really changes it. Doesn't matter what I eat, I always feel pretty crappy. And that's just what it is. But it was absolutely after that stomach, like I had food poisoning. You know, you never know what's going on there. It can be lots of different things. Um, they were the root, but the immune system was interacted with similarly, you know, he had antibiotic prescribed to deal with like the food poisoning bizarre GI stuff that popped up. And it was after that that the immune system did not keep infections in control. And once we got into it, there was recurrent streptococcus in the gut and there was a Bartonella infection in the body. And so that immune system could no longer keep them under wraps, and they persisted because that immune balance was lost at the antibiotic. And for him, it could have been the acute infection. You know, both of those can be triggers. So so far, acute infections are triggers, stressors are triggers of all kinds, antibiotics can be triggers. Another immune interactor is vaccine, the whole vaccine category. This can be a sticky topic, but I want to be clear that it is purely an immune interaction. The purpose of a vaccine by design is to provoke that TH2 antibody sign to create antibodies for whatever we're vaccinating against. And that effectively creates immunity. Now, this can create too much TH2 inflammatory response where the body doesn't ever cycle back to getting that balance back. It can start an inflammation cascade, it can bring out dormant infections. There are lots of things that can happen at the point of vaccination. And when we vaccinate is also important. For vaccinating when the body's already sick, that's kind of like a double blow to immune interaction. So that's always a big, whatever your personal conviction decision path may be on the vaccination journey of all sorts, whether for your kids or yourself, we always want to discourage vaccinating while sick because that's like two blows to the immune system at one time. The vaccine interacts with the immune system while the acute infection or sickness is interacting with the immune system. And after that, you can have an imbalanced immune system. And remember, the vaccines for an adult include those that they took as a child, those taken for travel later in life. I have a client who traveled abroad to Africa and had to have vaccinations. She had a great trip, she had a great time. She took her antimalarial meds, everything was great and fine. And about six months after that, the body just declined, declined, declined, declined, declined. Autoimmune cascade, lots of infection issues. And it really does seem to go back to the blow of the immune trigger of a vaccine, followed by an elective antibiotic for a good, like if I mean I've been to Africa and I took malaria medication, I would do it again. But that is going to interact with the immune system. So you have two immune interactions, and then we saw the immune system go down and not be able to keep dormant infections where they belong in dormancy. So all of these things are important. And then we also think about the accrual of vaccinations in your lifetime. So those cold and flu type vaccines that are taken every year, those do continually annually interact with your immune system. And the accrual of them and their adjuvants and just the interaction of that immune stimulant each year can push the immune system to be heavier on the antibody, TH2, inflammatory side. Those related to pregnancy, we think about that too. There are several vaccinations that can be recommended during pregnancy. Whooping coughs, an easy, easy go-to. That's a regular thing, right? And sometimes that is part of the beginning of an immune system that becomes imbalanced that we see show itself after pregnancy. The last thing I will say on the vaccines topic is we do see children who seem to be vaccine injured. And in some ways, there are children who are vaccine injured. But I wonder, and I see very often, that the vaccine is often just a trigger for an imbalanced immune system. And what happens is the child now develops allergies, develops all sorts of symptoms that fit a pattern of an infection. And in our experience, we have found that there's usually an infection that has been brought out of dormancy after that vaccine experienced, and the child is now struggling with the chronic infection. And is maybe that the vaccine injury? Maybe. But I want to I think of a kiddo who came to us and had all sorts of um just allergy issues, lots of allergy issues. So born, things are good, healthy baby, birth went great, extensive history started at 15 months, like on the dot. Um the family had slowed down vaccinations. We got to the Hib series, and um, you know, they were being proactive. Aluminum was a concern of theirs. If you want to get into materials and vaccinations, you can do that and learn about that. And they had elected to slow things down. Um, and very shortly after we started to see an allergic reaction to a food, a food that he had always, a food that he had many times before. And it was a swollen face, um, face blotchy and swollen, then some body rashes followed shortly thereafter, then retrying it again after some allergy experience or some experiences at the allergist and got rashy and swollen at that point. So you can see the immune system over time. The first offense to shrimp was a whole new thing. Um, that would have been the first time the child reacted to it despite having it before. But that immune trigger of the vaccine brought about an overactive antibody TH2 side to where now, post-vaccine, the child is having a response to a food that was a normal part of his life. And then over time, we have a second exposure to the food, and we're seeing more elaborate immune response. Now we're seeing more than just face blotchy. We're seeing some swelling, we're seeing more rashes, we're seeing more allergic response as that TH2 antibody side ramps up over time. And child continues to develop eczema to start to develop respiratory issues, some kind of asthma presentation. Then we're seeing skin and allergic symptoms over time, and then the eczema and rash stays pretty consistent despite having an impeccable diet, being um working on detoxin drainage and really working hard at the child's health, the immune system continues to be imbalanced, and that antibody side is pushing too much. And the original trigger for the child was a vaccine. So it's is it always that the vaccine's bad? I don't really care to discuss that. The vaccine does interact with your immune system and it can trigger response. Vaccines of all kinds. Another immune trigger that we want to talk about is mold. Mold is not great, but the reality of mold is that it's around all the time. I live across from a five-acre pond. I can tell you in the summer that the outside of my house in the morning has kind of like a fungusy, uh, moist vibe about it. I live in Kentucky. It just is what it is in the summer, right? Mold exists around us, mold is everywhere. Now, I do not think that living with mold is healthy. Mold can be really harmful to our health, but ultimately mold is in our environment. It's in our food. A lot of foods. We look at farming and how foods are moved and stored. We look at apples and how they're held over winter and they have sugar inside of them. And if you look in the core, there can be mold in there. You can still eat the apple and everything can be okay. So mold is a problem to a degree, and it depends on how it's interacting with the immune system. Now, if someone's done a protocol because they lived in a home and there's been lots of mold, and then we see issues persisting for me, the mold was a triggering event, and we now have new infections. I think of a family that we've seen for about a year and a half, and they came to us. We saw very quickly that there seemed to be mold symptoms in everyone, identified there was major mold in the house, had remediation done. They moved out. We did all the mold protocols. Things were good. Everybody's feeling a little bit better. Much better, actually. And then very quickly they started dropping like flies again. What is going on? First move is to test mold in the home. Is there still mold there? That's logical, right? Well, there's no mold in the home. Home's clear. Then we moved out of the home. We moved into a different place that was totally clean. And the issues persisted. And so what happened was mold was an immune trigger. It was such an immune burden that after the body cleared those things, that immune system had been interacted with and it lost its flexibility between that killer TH1 side and that antibody TH2 side. And by and large, the whole family, the children had different symptoms, a lot of um psychiatric brain inflammation, ADHD, some dyslexia stuff popping up in kids that didn't have that before, fatigue, leg pain. They live in a Lyme endemic area. And we moved into it. And sure enough, several, all of them actually, now that I'm thinking about it, tested positive for Lyme. And it took over time, and even eventually the dad came in and started to have issues too. Something like mold is again an immune trigger. It is bad and not helpful for our health in and of itself. That is completely true. But secondarily to that, it can be an immune trigger. A lot of people too have lived in mold will say the mold was hard, I recovered and I got better, but I've never been the same since then. I've never been the same since then is a trigger for me to always go back and look for was there a triggering event? Where was it? Because these things are always present. So mold can be a triggering event as well as its very own problem. The last, and I would say probably the most common triggering event that we see outside of acute illness is pregnancy. This is a good natural process that we love, but it is a naturally TH2 state, meaning that the body shifts away from the killer top dominant TH1 side. Why? Because we need more TH2 so that the immune system doesn't kill or reject the baby. The immune system works off the idea of self and non-self. So for me, my self is Elizabeth. That's my body. Non-self are these glasses, the sweater, my lip gloss, this remote. It's a mouse to the computer. All of these other things are non-self. Mold flying in there, my dog's hair, foods that I eat, those are non-self. The immune system's only job is to discern what is self, what is non-self, and attack the non-self. A baby is non-self, right? It's actually an entire other being. And so what happens in this good, wonderful process of pregnancy is the body calms down that TH1 side, puts it to sleep. We're not going to kill anything right now. Okay, we're just going to calm down the killing thing because we're pregnant. And TH2 takes over and is the predominant immune function during pregnancy. This is also why some women feel way better pregnant than they do the rest of the time because that TH1 side is calmed. TH2 is appropriately busy. We want this. We want the body to be TH2 dominant during pregnancy. So there is no killing aborting of the baby, which is non-self, right? So sometimes after pregnancy, what should happen is the immune system will shift back into balance, where you have TH1 functioning, it's back online, it's doing its killer job, and TH2 is calmed down, it no longer has to do the bulk of the immune work and things are nice and balanced. But this often doesn't happen. Whether it's stress, whether it's exhaustion, I mean there's so much going on after you have a baby, right? I'm sure you can think of a friend right now whose health deteriorated after the birth of their child. They popped up with autoimmune disease. They just never could bounce back and we're like, oh, she's tired, she's postpartum. Once that baby's older than a year, she'll be doing better, but she's still not doing better. Pregnancy is a triggering event. So this can also happen in reverse. If someone is dysregulated before, say they have a really active, overactive TH2 side. I had a client who celiac genetically, and she did not have gluten anytime. If she did have it, she would have to vomit um profusely until it was out. And then she still had swelling and sometimes needed epipin. It's to support the gluten allergy, essentially at that point. She was pregnant and she's wild and was continually trying gluten-like here and there, like, let me just see if I can get by. Went to Europe, let me just see if I can have a little. Um, and she did. She could do gluten during pregnancy with no big deal. And then after her pregnancy happened, she birthed her baby, she actually felt better day to day, just in general. General improved state of health. She reintroduced gluten, had it like normal, no reactions, no epipheny, no vomit. Is it as common that the immune system goes back to balance after pregnancy into a more ideal state? It's not as common, but it does happen. But more often than not, we had an immune system become imbalanced, and those dormant infections can pop up. So I'm going to think of two clients come to mind. The first um had a two and a half year old, then had another baby. Um she started sweating profusely in the first couple months. She'd had a baby in the wintertime in a cold climate. And about the two and a half months, she marked, she went back to teaching um exercise classes like she had before, but was still having the sweating, kind of just like chalked it off to pregnancy, postpartum hormone shifts. And the day after the class, she came down with like a stomach bug, um, a lot of dizziness. She had nausea, very lightheaded. She started to get some blurriness in her eyes, and it went on for two weeks. Ding, ding, ding. This is what we see when infections are starting to bust through. So the eye blurriness is a big sign for me. Changes in vision are a big sign for me when it comes to Bartanella. And so Bartanella did end up being a part of her health issue. And it was starting there at that two and a half mark mark. She went back to exercising, she was moving her tissues, releasing waist, just like we normally do. When you move your tissues, your body cleans stuff out, body's working. And she basically had like a Herxheimer reaction that she never had before. And she continued on, she kept having intense night sweats. She had a lot of signs that her body was trying to clear something. Then we moved into being super irritable, very, very kind, gentle woman, extreme irritability. She was like, I'm so embarrassed I can't be patient with my children. I want to blow up with them. I can't even think clearly. I just feel like I'm in a fog, like I'm just in a completely other room. If you're talking to me, like I just am not here. Um, she went to the doctor, they did some labs. No one looked at a thyroid panel for her. They just did some basic stuff and said, You look okay. Um, things are fine. And then we can offer you like a CAT scan, maybe for some of your dizziness, your oddities. And we move on and down and down. She ended up having a lot of shakiness and tremors developed. Um she actually had some irregularities on her scan, but also things that she was sent home to say, like, these are normal, they'll just pass. And she went to a different clinic, had a thyroid penal drone, saw that she had thyroid antibodies developing. She'd never had that before. And if you look at a hyper and hypothyroid presentation, you can go back and forth and the sweating and the shakiness and some of the dizziness, all these things can be part of that, and then fatigue set in. And so, come to find out at the end of that, she ended up with Lyme and EBV, and she did have some, she has thyroid autoimmunity that is decreasing over time. But ultimately, that pregnancy, two and a half months after, and that time when her body's trying to go back to balance, it couldn't. And those chronic infections things she'd been exposed to, you know, she's home for two and a half months. What are the odds that she had a tick bite during that time in the winter in the northern part of America? Pretty close to none. And so what we see is that immune system imbalance now has allowed the killer side to snooze and not do any work, and that Lyme infection that had been there dormant busted through. And now we're seeing symptoms of that. And that ABV, the hem in dormant she could identify when she had mono as a younger child, is now aggressively shining through. And the only thing that changed was the end of a pregnancy and an immune system trying to go back to balance that couldn't. Another client, she came to us seven months postpartum, having symptoms of a rapid heart rate, heat intolerance, insomnia, fatigue. She did some blood work, they checked her thyroid lightly. And I say that because there's a full thyroid panel that we like to run, and your doctor will run probably about um half to a third of that. And she had a small panel done, and they noted that she was hyperthyroid and kind of checked her heart rate off to that, which is fair, but her heart rate continued to be very elevated very consistently. And she also started to develop a condition called gostrochondritis. And they told her that it was probably just from holding her baby too much. So if you know anything about that, it is where you kind of have like some chest wall pain, you have rib inflammation, you have that costal cartilage where your ribs connect to your sternum, you're having inflammation in that area. I love the person, whoever came up with the idea. I'm sure they're wonderful and well-meaning, but lots of women hold their babies. Lots of women hold their babies too much. Most of these women do not develop costochondritis. This was a flag to me. She also got mastitis, she was having a trouble kicking that. So, again, there's an immune system to me that's not able to do balance after pregnancy. Her heart rate would go up, her resting heart rate was at 90. She was having insomnia. Symptoms were starting to stack on top of each other, and not all of them fit a thyroid presentation. Then she moved in and her eyes were starting to have issues. Um, she wasn't able to wear contacts, and her doctor said, you know, visually and you know, vision-wise, your eyes are fine. They're just itching. Like you just need to go home and not wear your contacts for a bit, and that'd be that. She had no issues, zero zip naught issues before baby. She went to the ER at one point with the tachycardia episodes. Um, no one had looked for thyroid antibodies. She was also having heat intolerance issues where she was having sweating, she would get really hot, ASAP, like a very quick zero to a hundred. She couldn't sleep in the bed with her husband. She couldn't stand even sleeping on the couch with no sheets on the fan on high, no covers. Anxiety was a new thing for her that was just peaking, which think about postpartum experiences. How easy would it be to say, oh, you're postpartum? Everyone has anxiety, postpartum, which is absolutely true and can be true. But the group of symptoms together was saying to me, there's Bartanella here, there's probably Lyme here. It sounds like there's Streptococcus here, it sounds like maybe parvovirus is involved too with the flushing and the amount of heat issues. Sure enough, all those things were there. And as we addressed them, the symptom load continued to peel off. But what was the changing factor for her? It was pregnancy. And I would add to that, it's questionable. She was strep B positive. So if you're familiar in America, we test for strep B towards the end of pregnancy. If you're positive, then you need to be on antibiotics and delivery. Other countries do not do this or follow this particular antibiotic protocol, but she was on antibiotics at the time of delivery. So there's another immune hit around the time of another immune hit, the good and natural pregnancy that prefers that TH2 state. So, you know, these things are all normal parts of life, right? It doesn't mean that we cannot take an antibiotic. Like I said, if I need one, I sure expect you to give me one if it's going to need um to be a part of my health to rescue me. But um, a lot of these things, when we have eyes to see them as triggering events, when we have eyes to see the symptom cascades that come after these triggering events, we can more quickly and readily help ourselves. We can more quickly and readily help our um medical nutrition practitioners help us. So in our modern world, there are a lot more things our bodies are dealing with, right? There are a lot more things that we have to do. We need to remove toxins from our life. We need to stay hydrated with clean water, we need to eat well, we need to rest. We're inundated with um stimulus all day long through our phones, through the amount of people that we see. I think about the amount of people I see right now, and I take my car away in my mind. If I took my car away and I didn't have that, how many people would I see? This is kind of a new idea for humanity that we have so much stimulation and connection, but not connection with other people, there are lots of things that are different for humans now that make some of these immune triggers a lot shorter trip to dysfunction. But when we take care of ourselves, when we know what a triggering event is, when we know what to look for, things can change. So the big key that I talk about a lot and we talked about already is that if you have um a line in the sand when your health changed, I want you to think about was there a triggering event around that time? Was there an antibiotic? Had you been pregnant? Were you exposed to mold? Did you have an infection? Were you sick? Did you have a vaccine? Did you maybe even have a steroid? Because a steroid also interacts with your immune system or a biologic medication, any of those things. Were they involved in your health shifting or a major toxic exposure? These sorts of things can be the impetus that keeps an immune system in a place where it ignores an infection and you experience symptoms of the infection. So remember lots of things. I think the biggest thing about this discussion maybe is the pregnancy piece that there are plenty of women who feel great after pregnancy. There are plenty of people who recover after divorces and job losses and moves, and plenty still, like the husband who eats the Taco Bell and doesn't take care of himself, who do that, go through an acute illness and come out immune balanced. These things are still possible and happen all the time. But also triggering events can create immune imbalance. And we do have hope. The body is a beautiful form, it does all kinds of things. We've studied it for bazillions of years and we still haven't figured it all the way out, even with our wonderful technology, and your body can keep working without us knowing every little part. A bad event doesn't always equal bad health forever, but it can, and it does. And thanks to triggering events and the understanding of chronic infections, we know what to do about it. I hope you're leaving encouraged, curious, and hopeful. If you learned something, I'd love for you to share this episode with a friend. Hey, we're all healing together. You can learn more about my practice, our team, and what it's like to work with us at heyhey may.com. I teach lots on Instagram and answer questions each Monday. My Instagram handle is at Hey Hey Elizabeth May. And my cookbook, Hey Hey Everyday, is available on heyheymei.com and Amazon. Happy healing.